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Diamond Sponsor Q&A: Bjorn Book-Larsson shows off what Viveport has in store for devs at GDC 2019

By Staff | March 12, 2019

At GDC 2019, attendees will have the opportunity to interact with an array of sponsors who help fuel the games industry, including our Diamond Partners, whose support plays an integral role to the success of GDC.

This year, Viveport is joining us on the show floor both to showcase its VR headsets and its game distribution platform Viveport. To get a better sense of Viveport's plans, we reached out to VP Bjork Book-Larsson for a quick Q&A that you can now read below!

Could you please introduce yourself and your role at Viveport?

My name is Bjorn Book-Larsson and I’m the Vice President of Product at VIVEPORT, VIVE’s global platform and app store.

HTC’s headsets have continued to wow developers, what kind of technology advances is the company looking at for 2019?

Thanks. We’re really proud of our standing in the developer community and view it as our primary charge to be the number one advocate of VR developers.

On the technology front, our goal is to refine VR for all audiences, delivering hardware, content and platforms so that there’s more to do in VR than ever before.

To start, we’re building a new headset that offers absolute convenience and accessibility. Over 85% of VR intenders believe that ease of set up is the most important factor when making a VR purchase decision and with VIVE Cosmos, we aim to offer just that. A premium headset that is quick to setup and can be taken on the go to new play environments, Cosmos will appeal to new audiences and inspire new use cases.

At GDC, we’ll walk developers through our platform and product roadmap for 2019 so their teams can quickly adapt to the new opportunities ahead. With in-depth demonstrations on our SDKs, we’ll provide the tools and knowledge necessary to accelerate VR development.

Viveport has helped VR developers get their games in front of a huge crowd of players, what are your plans to grow the platform?

In April, Viveport will make its largest upgrade to the platform yet. Viveport Infinity will increase every Viveport developer’s reach as our subscription service becomes unlimited. For one monthly price, members will have unrestricted access to our library of over 600 titles. We believe this new model will help customers discover more VR titles and showcase how much great content already exists.

Infinity is a win for developers as well as a win for consumers. Developers will get paid when their content gets played, rewarding those who make engaging and sticky VR content. And with unlimited access to content, more developers can monetize a single Infinity member.

Viveport has also become platform agnostic. Oculus Rift owners can access all the benefits of Viveport and Viveport Subscription, effectively doubling a Viveport developer’s reach. Viveport Infinity will also travel with you to any standalone headset built on our WAVE platform (like Vive Focus), bringing our subscription service to a new category of VR devices.

As the VR market cools off a little from the initial hype, what strategies is Viveport pursuing to maintain interest in virtual reality?

Our goal for 2019 is to refine VR for every audience. For consumers, we’re working to drive engagement even higher in headset – meaning people spend more time in headset and have a broad spectrum of content types available. We’re aligning our hardware, platform and content to enable this vision.

In addition to VIVE Cosmos and Viveport Infinity, we’re redesigning the way users navigate their VR experience with VIVE Reality System. To create a feeling of stepping between worlds, we’ve reimagined new ways to display content and transport users between immersive experiences of all types.

For enterprise, we’re seeing an ever-increasing level of enthusiasm and engagement for VR solutions in a range of industries. With VIVE Pro Eye, we’re excited to bring the benefits of eye tracking to businesses. Integrated eye tracking will allow business to gather more data about their training environments, help users to improve their performance, and/or optimize how computing resources are used.